Scott Olden’s employees know who’s boss – they are.
The president of The Lawn Mowgul, Dallas, Texas pairs up his field employees – a driver and second laborer on each team – and allows each crew to function as its own small company.
“We have assigned each account to a crew and have empowered our employees to make decisions as to their best routing method, and involve them in job costing issues to ensure they remain happy with the work that is asked of them,” Olden says. “This approach truly puts a crew’s success in their own hands.”
Each of Olden’s mini-companies handles 70 to 100 accounts depending on the sizes of the jobs. The Lawn Mowgul outlines each account’s service requests and then leaves the details of accomplishing those tasks up to the crews.
“For instance, we’ll list the customer, the service they want, the day of the week they want it on and we’ve mapped out all of the accounts so we’re in certain parts of town on certain days of the week,” Olden notes. “We’ve given the crews some efficiencies there by making sure that customers know their lawn can only be done on certain days. Occasionally, we’ll have someone who works nights and asks that we not come before 10 a.m., so we’ll work around the customer’s requests.
“After all that, we’ll give the information to the crews and say, “‘you’re getting paid to do this the most efficient way – you figure out what that is,’” Olden continues. “We may route one area initially, but the crew might come to us and say, ‘Instead of going A-B-C, it’s better to do it C-B-A.’ They’ll let us know and make the adjustment.”
Olden and his managers will check sties for quality or help out if a crew has trouble, but other than that, each “company” is on its own. And Olden notes that crews try hard to do all their work properly the first time because, with The Lawn Mowgul’s piecemeal payment system (see “Piece by Piecemeal”), call-backs and wasted time reduce the number of lawns each crew can tend to in a day, directly impacting each employee’s paycheck.
“There’s a chart on the wall where we write man-hours so employees can look at that and know exactly what they’re getting paid for each yard,” Olden says. “That also puts them in control of their own hours. If a crew says a job should take an hour and every single time they’re out there for an hour-and-a-half because the homeowner is always out in the yard, walking around and making them do extra work, they know they could be doing something else.
“Our policy is to say, ‘Let’s take care of the customer, get them used to the type of work that they want and then we’ll call that customer later to make sure the crew is doing everything all right,” Olden continues. “If they are, we explain to the customer that we need to raise their price to match the level of service they’re getting. If they’re not willing to do that. It’s just a business decision and we’ll move on down the line. A lot of times the person doesn’t really have a problem making the price adjustment. But the crewmembers are keenly aware of accounts where they can’t match their times.”
In all, empowering employees to function as small companies-winthin-the-company, has worked out well for The Lawn Mowgul, emphasizing hard work and accountability. “The crews know that if a complaint comes in, it is their responsibility to resolve it on their own immediately,” Olden says. “This attention to customer needs slows the crews down on days when they need to go back and fix a problem, but our enforcement of the policy keeps the crews honest with an effort to get it right the first time.”
The author is Assistant Editor if Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at lspiers@lawnandlandscape.com.